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No matter how you use audio on your Mac, Rogue Amoeba has tools for you.

Start right up top in the menu bar, with SoundSource. It gives you quick controls over any app playing audio on your Mac: control the volume level, redirect to a different output, and even add effects.

Need to record audio? Use their charmingly simple audio recorder Piezo, or its powerful sibling Audio Hijack to turn whatever you can hear into an audio file. Audio Hijack 4.5 even adds new transcription features to turn your recordings into text.

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This week on a roller coaster of an episode:

David has been on a journey with his email setup, and as Stephen offers him a shoulder to cry on, Sparks drops a bombshell.

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I love this confession:

One of the Macs my local CompUSA had out on display in its Apple ghetto was a G4 Cube. I had read somewhere that they ran hot, so one day I put my hand a few inches over the Cube to feel the convective flow rising out of the top grille. The machine immediately overheated and shut down to protect itself.

Let me be clear (as clear as the Cube). I didn’t put my hand on the grille—it was at least 3–4 inches above it. But that was enough. And from that day forward, every time I passed that Cube, I put my hand above it and caused a crash.

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Pierre Dandumont has saved a long-lost bit of Macintosh history:

If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions. But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM.

I had talked about this mysterious ROM a few years ago. It’s documented by Apple in some old documents, but without much detail. According to Apple, the ROM contains fonts for kanji in 12 and 18 points, and they are loaded at startup by KanjiTalk. On a regular Macintosh Plus, you need a floppy disk with the files, which slows down startup and uses some RAM, whereas on a Japanese Macintosh Plus, the font is in ROM and doesn’t take up RAM. You also avoid loading files from a floppy disk, theoretically saving 6 seconds during startup. That’s a conservative estimate, as we’ll see—it assumes you’re not switching disks manually.

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At Macworld 2004, Apple announced Jam Pack, a collection of additional loops for use in GarageBand:

Jam Pack triples the music content for musicians and aspiring musicians alike with over 2,000 additional loops including many for hip-hop and electronica; over 100 additional software instruments, including a concert grand piano and 12 string guitars; over 100 additional pro-quality effects presets; and 15 additional guitar amps, including surf, grunge, heavy blues and atmospheric.

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Mozilla:

Pocket will no longer be available after July 8, 2025.

You can continue using the app and browser extensions until this date. After July 8, Pocket will move into export-only mode. Users can export saves anytime until October 8, 2025, after which user data will be permanently deleted.

Fakespot is also shutting down.

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Ming-Chi Kuo has weighed in on OpenAI’s future hardware. The analyst wrote a long post on X about the hardware he expects to see out of the new partnership between OpenAI and Jony Ive:

My industry research indicates the following regarding the new AI hardware device from Jony Ive’s collaboration with OpenAI:

1. Mass production is expected to start in 2027.

2. Assembly and shipping will occur outside China to reduce geopolitical risks, with Vietnam currently the likely assembly location.

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This week on the podcast:

The guys discuss Fortnite’s return to the App Store, cover Google IO, and are interrupted by huge news from Sam Altman and Jony Ive. They then talk about feelings.

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Wild news just broke: the company Sam Altman and Jony Ive started to build AI-based hardware has been purchased for a cool $6.5 billion, as Mike Isaac and Cade Metz report:

The deal, which is OpenAI’s biggest acquisition, will bring in Mr. Ive and his team of roughly 55 engineers, designers and researchers. They will assume creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and build hardware that helps people better interact with the technology.

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Jenny List:

The Macintosh Plus was Apple’s third version on the all-in-one Mac, and for its time it was a veritable powerhouse. If you don’t have one here in 2025 there are a variety of ways to emulate it, but should you wish for something closer to the silicon there’s now [max1zzz]’s all-new Mac Plus motherboard in a mini-ITX form factor to look forward to.

As with other retrocomputing communities, the classic Mac world has seen quite a few projects replacing custom parts with modern equivalents. Thus it has reverse engineered Apple PALs, a replacement for the Sony sound chip, an ATtiny based take on the Mac real-time clock, and a Pi Pico that does VGA conversion. It’s all surface mount save for the connectors and the 68000, purely because a socketed processor allows for one of the gold-and-ceramic packages to be used. The memory is soldered, but with 4 megabytes, this is well-specced for a Mac Plus.

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Yesterday, in a late-night post on X, the billionaire wrote:

Colossus 2 will be the first Gigawatt AI training supercluster

Samuel Hardiman, at The Daily Memphian earlier today:

MLGW’s maximum electricity demand of all time is about 3,500 megawatts, or three-and-a-half gigawatts. Its power use is weather dependent: In the summer, MLGW uses 2,800 to 3,000 megawatts, while during the winter, it’s 1,700 to 1,800.

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macOS Sequoia supports these Intel-based Macs:

• 2017 iMac Pro
• 2018 Mac mini
• 2018–2020 MacBook Pro models
• 2019 Mac Pro
• 2019–2020 iMac models
• 2020 MacBook Air

What’s more important than the model year is when these Macs stopped being sold:

Model:Removed from Sale:2017 iMac ProMarch 20212018 Mac miniJanuary 20232019 Mac ProJune 20232020 MacBook ProOctober 20212020 iMacMarch 20222020 MacBook AirNovember 2020

As you can see, the Intel Mac mini and Intel Mac Pro lasted all the way until 2023, with the 2019 Mac Pro being removed from sale less than two years ago, when its Apple silicon-powered replacement was announced at WWDC.

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